Listen Up Entrepreneurs: Here's How To Tell Your Story

Micha Kaufman
, ContributorI write about the Gig Economy, entrepreneurs and the future of work.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

As an entrepreneur with a bit of gray hair I get to meet with a many young(er) entrepreneurs seeking advice. After I listen to their ideas and stories, I’m often left confused about the true mission of the company and the road to getting there. Why is that?

In the midst of TechCrunch Disrupt, this is a particularly timely lesson. Every startup needs a good story - a narrative - and every entrepreneur is a storyteller. It typically starts with an elevator pitch - a condensed version of the story that requires all the right ingredients and motives of a longer story one would like to listen to. At a blink, a story is typically measured by answering two questions: is this an interesting story that leaves the listener wanting to hear more and is this a simple story that listener immediately understands.

So why are startup stories often confusing or unclear? Sometimes, it is because the young venture still doesn’t have a good story to tell. But the more common answer to this question is that the story - and hence the product - are just too complex to quickly understand.

There are usually a number of reasons why this happens:

The ability to simplify complex ideas is not something all people excel in. For most people this is an acquired trait that requires substantial training.

The temptation to put all of your ideas out there at once simply because you can.

The ability to turn ideas into lines of code has become a commodity in the past decade. A prototype that used to take 1-3 years of work 15 years ago is now taking 6-9 months. The obvious upside is that entrepreneurs get to test their ideas fast and see if they stick. They get to “fail fast,” collect data, iterate or simple choose to move on. That’s an upside that entrepreneurs a decade ago could only dream of. The downside - the temptation to put all your ideas out there at once because it’s possible and easy.

At Fiverr, we intentionally kept things extremely simple for people to understand. Our concept: “What would you do for $5?” - and in turn what would you buy. Here’s why and how we took this approach to our launch - and why startups need to focus on reducing the noise.

Why: The Attention Deficient generation

When introducing a new product, you want your target customers to understand the main value that it creates for them. In this world of information overload, our attention span has become so short that we essentially act like information scanners. If we can’t understand something in the blink of an eye, we usually just move on to the next thing. For this exact reason, it is imperative that products and ideas are simple to understand in a split second.

How: Adopting one-dimensional thinking

Think simple. As an entrepreneur you should ask yourself the following 3 hard but critical questions:

1. What is the single most important value proposition that my product offers to customers?

This is your differentiator and where you should excel. If you are good at three things, choose the strongest and most important to the customer. Focus only on one core value proposition. If you can build a loyal customer base that uses your product because your value proposition answers a true need, you are also likely to be in a better position to introduce additional features later without confusing them about your company’s key value.

2. If my website can only have one button that customers should click, what would that button be?

This is also referred to as the “single call for action,” i.e. the single action you need your customers to take in order to start getting them engaged. You’ll be let to this by answering the first question, but it’s a challenge to implement. If you visit AirBnB’s homepage, you will notice that the most apparent question (or action to take) on the page is “where do you want to stay?” That, along with the tagline “Rent from people in 29,457 cities and 192 countries” and the stunning visuals, makes it pretty clear even to people new to the site what can be achieved with AriBnB.

3. What’s the tag line?

Think about the short sentence that defines the core of what you are. When we first launched Fiverr, it was still a $5 only marketplace and we were looking for the right tagline. “A marketplace for services that people are willing to offer for $5” was too long. Coming up with the tagline “The things people do for $5” took a few weeks and probably around a hundred drafts.

Try: The backwards storytelling technique

When you think about the narrative for your company, try to think of it in the form of an evolving story - a plot that thickens if you will. If you think about it like that, you will find it easier to understand why you cannot expect your customers (the readers in this analogy) to understand how the story ends when they just opened the book and read the first paragraph of the first page.

When we first came up with the idea for Fiverr, we went through a process that allowed the idea to evolve into a grand vision. We came up with thousands of ideas for features and experiences, but we faced the same challenge: no one knew what Fiverr was and we couldn’t expect anyone to understand the grand vision from day one. To continue the analogy, we could see how the story ends, but we needed to write the first page of the book.

This is the art of reduction: the ability to disassemble the entire plot and write the book backwards so that the first paragraph of the book is both simple to digest, yet intriguing enough to entice people to continue reading. Taking thousands of features and reducing them to the few that are necessary to build a viable product is not an easy task, but finding the features that serve the core value proposition and define a clear call for action is essential.

Easier said than done, trust me, I know. It probably took us six months into the development of the alpha prototype to purify the experience, and it is a painful process of internal debate of what stays and what moves to the long list of future features.